Valkyria Chronicles
Went shopping with Mom today, before she and Dad took the hatchback down to Gig Harbor to meet up with a friend Dad met at Jazz camp. While they were out, I broke down and bought Valkyria Chronicles, which I played for six hours without so much as blinking. No eating, no napping, no checking email, no bio breaks; not so much as even shifting my seating position. When my parents got back, they had to literally pound on the windows of the TV room to get my attention so I would unlock the front door; I didn't hear them knock, I didn't notice their phone calls. The game is simply *mesmerizing* in its ability to remix design elements that I love from FF:Tactics, FFXII, and the Brothers In Arms series, and present them in a visual style that's half Last Exile and half Kiki's Delivery Service., with throwaway references to Yakitate! Japan and Porco Rosso.
(Oh, and just in case there was any doubt at all that this game was crafted especially for me, the squad's unofficial mascot is a flying pig named Hans. A pig. With wings. Named "Hans".)
And as if that weren't enough, it's got fascinatingly deep game mechanics related to intra-squad interactions on the battlefield. One of the two snipers assigned to Squad Seven is an eager-faced kid who exults at each shot that lands on target; the other is a detached, ironic (dare I say emo) fellow who nevertheless performs at his best when a friend's got his back. And then there's the mechanic chick that keeps trying to hit on the female romantic lead, and whose complains bitterly if you tag-team her with any male squadmates. Pairing her with the emo sniper would be a recipe for classic screwball comedy, except that this is a war story, and I need the sniper to be sniping and the mechanic to keep my tank in good repair, because while the AI opponents aren't terribly smart, they *will* rend my little squad limb from limb if I get sloppy with my manuevers, and if I don't get the medics there in time (within three turns, natch) my squad members *can* die permanent deaths, and all that'll be left is a memorial stone at the cemetary back at Headquarters. In practice, character-death is easy to avoid, even when they're taken out of the fight - but when every squad member has its own face, it's own voice, and it's own personality, the threat of death changes how I approach each fight.
Of particular note, though, are the squad members whose effectiveness drops when they're fighting alongside a member of the hated Darcsen ethnic minority. The ethnic thing (Proxy for Jews? Gypsies?) adds an unexpectedly edgy jolt to the stylized-quasi-WWII story. "WWII" plus "Hated Ethnic Minority" is like a Checkov play where someone puts a bazooka on the table in Act I. In the meantime, the minority squadmember is the squad's tank driver - and the adopted sister to the squad leader - while the two biggest bigots are your best assault trooper and tank-hunter. So do I swap them out, or send them to a different part of the battlefield entirely? And in a curious UI twist, I know who the bigots are from the Squad Roster (it's listed among their attributes - "Country Boy: Gain extra movement over open fields. Braggart: Gain extra accuracy when near friends. Hates Darcsens: Lose morale when near Darcsen allies"). But, the same UI doesn't show me who are the Darcsens. After all, being a Darcsen doesn't appear to change someone's ability to do their job as a soldier. The mechanical effect is entirely on the bigot, so it's listed there.
So should I comb through my squad's personnel files, looking for the ones with dark hair and dark eyes, and go out of my way to keep them separated from the bigots? Should I fire the bigots from the squad pre-emptively, or should I roll with them a while and see if their intolerance actually affects their battlefield performance relative to their peers on the squad? And if I do fire the bigots, who's to say the game's recruiting pool won't just randomly generate more of them? Is the game really asking me to do racial profiling in the name of making the levels easier to beat?
At least the flirty mechanic chick is only sexist, not racist...
(Oh, and just in case there was any doubt at all that this game was crafted especially for me, the squad's unofficial mascot is a flying pig named Hans. A pig. With wings. Named "Hans".)
And as if that weren't enough, it's got fascinatingly deep game mechanics related to intra-squad interactions on the battlefield. One of the two snipers assigned to Squad Seven is an eager-faced kid who exults at each shot that lands on target; the other is a detached, ironic (dare I say emo) fellow who nevertheless performs at his best when a friend's got his back. And then there's the mechanic chick that keeps trying to hit on the female romantic lead, and whose complains bitterly if you tag-team her with any male squadmates. Pairing her with the emo sniper would be a recipe for classic screwball comedy, except that this is a war story, and I need the sniper to be sniping and the mechanic to keep my tank in good repair, because while the AI opponents aren't terribly smart, they *will* rend my little squad limb from limb if I get sloppy with my manuevers, and if I don't get the medics there in time (within three turns, natch) my squad members *can* die permanent deaths, and all that'll be left is a memorial stone at the cemetary back at Headquarters. In practice, character-death is easy to avoid, even when they're taken out of the fight - but when every squad member has its own face, it's own voice, and it's own personality, the threat of death changes how I approach each fight.
Of particular note, though, are the squad members whose effectiveness drops when they're fighting alongside a member of the hated Darcsen ethnic minority. The ethnic thing (Proxy for Jews? Gypsies?) adds an unexpectedly edgy jolt to the stylized-quasi-WWII story. "WWII" plus "Hated Ethnic Minority" is like a Checkov play where someone puts a bazooka on the table in Act I. In the meantime, the minority squadmember is the squad's tank driver - and the adopted sister to the squad leader - while the two biggest bigots are your best assault trooper and tank-hunter. So do I swap them out, or send them to a different part of the battlefield entirely? And in a curious UI twist, I know who the bigots are from the Squad Roster (it's listed among their attributes - "Country Boy: Gain extra movement over open fields. Braggart: Gain extra accuracy when near friends. Hates Darcsens: Lose morale when near Darcsen allies"). But, the same UI doesn't show me who are the Darcsens. After all, being a Darcsen doesn't appear to change someone's ability to do their job as a soldier. The mechanical effect is entirely on the bigot, so it's listed there.
So should I comb through my squad's personnel files, looking for the ones with dark hair and dark eyes, and go out of my way to keep them separated from the bigots? Should I fire the bigots from the squad pre-emptively, or should I roll with them a while and see if their intolerance actually affects their battlefield performance relative to their peers on the squad? And if I do fire the bigots, who's to say the game's recruiting pool won't just randomly generate more of them? Is the game really asking me to do racial profiling in the name of making the levels easier to beat?
At least the flirty mechanic chick is only sexist, not racist...